Academic dissertation to be presented with the assent of the Doctoral Training Committee of Technology and Natural Sciences of the University of Oulu for public defence in Auditorium IT116, Linnanmaa, on 9 December 2016, at 12 noon

Abstract

High energy prices and new environmental policies have made geothermal energy increasingly popular. The EU, including Finland, aims to increase the use of renewable energy resources and reduce carbon emissions. Geothermal energy pile foundations, so-called energy piles, are considered a viable alternative technology for producing energy instead of traditional methods. Geothermal heat pump systems are economically efficient and renewable environmentally friendly energy production systems in which the ground acts as a heat source in winter and as a heat sink in summer.

Energy piles are economical systems, as they act as dual-purpose structures in energy production and load transfer from buildings to the ground, avoiding extra expenses in ground boring solely for energy production. However, use of ground heat exchangers (GHE) for energy production in energy piles can result in temperature variations in the pile shaft and surrounding soil, in turn affecting the thermo-mechanical behaviour of pile shaft and soil in both structural and geotechnical terms. Despite large numbers of energy piles being installed, there is still a lack of reliable information and experience about the thermo-mechanical behaviour of these structures and their energy efficiency in cold climates.

This thesis investigated the efficiency performance of energy pile foundations and their productivity in cold climates by considering different groundwater flow effects and short-term imbalanced seasonal thermal loadings. The structural and geotechnical bearing capacity of different types of energy piles fitted with GHEs were also evaluated, using numerical models, and the possibility of collapse due to use of thermal systems was examined.

Use of the model to compare the performance of different GHEs in terms of their efficiency revealed that at a particular fluid flow rate, double U-tube systems had greater productivity than other systems tested. The results also indicated that using energy piles under medium groundwater flow can improve the productivity of systems by around 20% compared with saturated conditions with no groundwater flow. It was also concluded that in a design context, the structural bearing capacity of piles needs to be reduced due to the additional thermal stresses induced by heating/cooling pile operations.